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Commercial fishing is one of the most damaging things one can do to gather a food source. Trawlers are so inefficient they perform the equivalent task of cutting down an entire forest to get a couple cows. With this hugely negative impact that trawling can have on undersea life in mind Australia has decided to ban, for at least two years, trawling by large boats in some protected waters.

Conservationists have welcomed the Government’s decision, saying the trawler would have “plundered” domestic fish stocks.

“The Government is right to take a precautionary approach, because monster boats like the Abel Tasman have no place in our waters,” Greenpeace spokesman Ben Pearson said in a statement.

The Greens also welcomed the announcement, but Tasmanian senator Peter Whish-Wilson says he is concerned other fisheries may be open to the Abel Tasman.

“There are other fisheries, both in the state water such as the sardine fisheries that it could fish, and potentially in mackerel,” he said.

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It is common knowledge that smoking kills people and, in democracies, providing health care for citizens is important and unquestioned. In Australia, they clearly care about each other as they now make it harder than ever for cigarette companies to shill their destructive product.

Starting in December, packs will instead come in a uniformly drab shade of olive and feature dire health warnings and graphic photographs of smoking’s health effects. The government, which has urged other countries to adopt similar rules, hopes the new packs will make smoking as unglamorous as possible.

Many countries mandate that packages display photos or text describing smoking’s health effects, and some limit the size of the branding or ban certain slogans, but Australia’s dual approach would be the strictest globally.

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Toronto has joined other cities around the world in banning the consumption and commercialization of shark fins. The vote was almost unanimous with only three people in council (including the worst mayor Toronto has seen) supporting the killing of sharks for soup. Everyone else on council knew better and supported the ban.

“Toronto’s action is a huge victory in the global fight against an illegal shark fin trade valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Rob Sinclair, Executive Director of WildAid Canada, who has been at the forefront of this campaign for the past five months.

Fins from up to 73 million sharks are used every year to make shark fin soup and related food products. Shark finning is a cruel and wasteful practice – captured at sea and hauled on deck, the sharks are often still alive while their fins are sliced off. Because shark meat is not considered as valuable as the fins, the maimed animals are tossed overboard to drown or bleed to death.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that 1/3 of the world’s shark species are threatened with extinction, with certain species experiencing declines up to 90%.

While the practice of shark finning is illegal in North America, current laws banning shark finning do not address the issue of the shark fin trade. Therefore, fins are being imported into North America from countries with few or even no shark protections in place.

Bans passed recently in California, Hawaii, Oregon and the state of Washington as well as the Ontario cities of Mississauga, and Brantford.

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In what is probably a first for our planet, a small town in Australia has banned the selling of bottled water. This is absolutely fantastic to see because bottle water is an asinine idea for the developed world. Most bottled water comes form the same source as municipal tap water then shipped around via fuel-burning vehicles.
Bottle water is a fantastic model of inefficiency so it’s good to see this news coming out of Australia

“Every bottle today was taken off the shelf and out of the fridges so you can only now buy refillable bottles in shops in Bundanoon,” Dee told AFP.

The tiny town, two hours south of Sydney, voted in July to ban bottled water after a drinks company moved to tap into a local aquifer for its bottled water business.

“In the process of the campaign against that the local people became educated about the environmental impact of bottled water,” said Dee.

“A local retailer came up with this idea of well why don’t we do something about that and actually stop selling the bottled water and it got a favourable reaction,” he said.

Dee said the 2,000-person town had made international headlines with their bid, which he hoped would spur communities across the world to action.